BS: The Mother of all BS threads

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 11:33 PM

Better there than that library in Alexandria. It's a few feet underwater and the books are a mess!

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 06:23 PM

Oh. I guess that means we aren't so liberated right now, huh?

Coulda fooled me -- but then, I just got back from DC (a/k/a "Fantasyland-On-The-Potomac").

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 05:38 PM

Imagination finds a road to the realm of the gods,
and there man can glimpse that which is to be
after the soul's liberation from the world of substance.

                        Kahlil Gibran

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 03:48 PM

I have yes. I remember those clay tablet hits. In one lifetime I actually made the Ptolemaic Top 100 with "Is ISis Is or Is Isis Ain't Your Baby?" but the master disk ended up being stored in an archive in Alexandria somewhere...




A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 03:36 PM

Ever listen to a wax cylinder recording? I have.

Heck, Amos. I remember the first recordings I ever listened to. They were my Grandmother's, and were in cuneiform on baked clay. We used to groove to such groups as "Xerxes And The Heart Rippers" and "Buddy" Darius doing songs like "Isis Ain't Your Earth Mom Any More" and "How Many Are Those Foreskins In The Window?".

As for 78 rpms -- I think I still have a couple.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 03:10 PM

You left out the opening, on your Suzy recapitulation, Rapaire. It's a musical dialog between two hoofers in straw hats:

I've got a brand new gal, her name is Suzy!
(Suzy?? That's a name that doesn't interest me!)
Maybe her name
Sounds rather plain.
(Then what can her attraction be?????)

This is from memory as it played on a half-inch thick 78RPM disk on our old Victrola in Maine. Some of the records only had recording on one side, they were so old. We had The Two Black Crows, Jimmy Durante singing Bill Bailey, and an original recording of the horse race "...Aaaaand Beetlebaum...." shtick.



A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 02:19 PM

And now, from page 518, an elegy from our own Bee-Dubya-Ell:

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Bee-dubya-ell - PM
Date: 28 Aug 03 - 12:23 PM

ODE TO FREDS (SNIFF, SNIFF, SUB, ZUB)

So time has come for us to bid
Farwell to our friends freds
Bubba Bubba's taken hostage
And Debbie Earl is deads

We won't be soon forgetting
The time they spent among us
Though Deb is now a fossil
And Bubba is a fungus

We hope they live in other states
Unknown to our World
Like sentient blobs of jelly
Bubba Bub' and Debbie Earl

Or they may be back tomorrow
Arisen from the dead
Cause dumber things have happened
Within this MOAB thread.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 02:15 PM

And now, from page 300:

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos - PM
Date: 18 Apr 06 - 09:36 AM

Well they busted up the dining room, to make that boiler burn,
They threw in passengers walking sticks, and Grandma's funeral urn,
They tore up every book on board, not just the ones wuz banned,
To make the boiler hotter still, and reach the ole Twelve Grand.

It was straining everybody's brain, and everybody's heart,
And the passengers cried out in fear, "Oh, why'd we ever start?"
They could not face the haunted looks, on the old an' tired hands,
Who staggered on into the night, all bound to make Twelve Grand.

They threw in everything they had! Ole poems from other folks!
Translations out of Babel Fish, and Donnie Osbourne jokes!
They threw in the Old Testament, and the Brotherhood of Man;
They swore they'd burn the train itself, if they could make Twelve Grand.

And when the morning sun came up, bright in the azure sky,
Where cows and chickens all lay flat,
From the wind of her passing by,
There's a smudge of smoke, out over the hill,
Yon toward the Promised Land.
And the MOAB crew take their rest at last,
For they got her past Twelve Grand.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 01:24 PM

"I light my first cigarette of the day and turn away from the window with a shudder," wrote Raymond Carver. "The foghorn sounds again, filling me with apprehension, and then, then stupendous grief." And the Chinese poet Li Po, perhaps feeling some similar apprehension many centuries earlier, wrote:


"With my whiskers grown long I have entered Ch'iu-pu,
In one morning gusts of wind have made them decay.
The calls of the gibbons make my hairs turn grey,
Now they flow round my head as so many strands of silk."

From the liner notes to Maritime Rites by Alvin Curran.

The liner notes then invoke the moral: Use everything.

Even MOAB.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 01:07 PM

Well, it was written about Silvio Berluscone in 2002, I believe.

Here's another snippet from another issue of the Threepenny Review, a very good literary magazine:

"According to Chateaubriand, on the shores of Amazonian rivers one could still hear the words of disappeared languages because the parrots repeated them—for parrots, of course, can live to be a hundred. "


Plucked from the middle of an interesting dissertation on the fate of the Basque language by one who was raised in it.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 01:00 PM

That's a really interesting excerpt, Amos. Who does it refer to? Tony Blair came to mind when I read it, but that was only a wild guess on my part.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:57 PM

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: John Hardly - PM
Date: 30 Apr 07 - 02:01 PM

I think that "ammonite" is what they make ammo out of. Or, it is that of which they make ammo. Or, ammo is made of "ammonite" (parenthesis optional).

Crayfish are in the creek in your back yard and if you want to fix them in a gumbo then, yes, you can mail some to me. Crayfish also worship Chemosh (this isn't well known, but I have it on good authority. I made it up).

Ammo is better for warship than for worship. That's just my observation. Your opinion may vary.

From page 192 of MOAB. A flashback for Amos.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:44 PM

Well, that can't be about me -- my life is more like a sentence highlighted with permanent black marker.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:33 PM

"...His unwavering contentment and self-confidence are excessive, like a phrase underlined in red. They may appear to be spontaneous, almost involuntary, but they're not: he has to make a constant effort (diluted only by habit) and, of course, he is always playing a part. His crazed (because permanent) smile, his jokes, his clowning, the way he embraces people and slaps them on the back, his forwardness, his hyperactivity—as trivial as it is superfluous—are all pure acts of will. It's as if, at every moment, he were saying (to his political colleagues, to the cameras, to the photographers, to the viewers, and above all to himself): "See how at ease I am, how well I handle myself, how I intrigue, how easily I fit into this world of global decision-making." The man himself doesn't quite believe it, in fact he doesn't believe it at all, which is why he has to make it absolutely clear that he is completely in his element."


From "Interpreters of Lives", Javier Marias, Threepenny Review

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:20 PM

I just had a call from a friend who thinks he has a kidney stone. He has pearled wees.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: MMario
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:18 PM

I weep for the ilk; the freshwater fur-whales and dolphins; the penguins and manatees suborned into supporting the Dutch World Domination play. I weep for whirled peas.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 12:08 PM

I weep for both of you. (wry grin) You fail to fully grasp the ineffable magnificence of William Shatner and/or the timeless allure of Winona Ryder.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 10:40 AM

I weep for Rapaire's insensitivity to ironic remarks lifting verses from the long-dead, much-honored.

He names a handful of songs he asserts he knows well, and equally groundlessly asserts I do not? I need only offer in rebuttal that he is a trumpet player, while I am a folksinger.

A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 09:50 AM

I weep for Amos' lack of knowledge. It's not like we didn't all sing that and other songs on those Sunday rides in the country, Mom driving and the rest of us sitting and singing in the back of the buggy as the old horse ambled along those shaded country lanes of so, so long ago.

Ah, the memories of songs like Purple People Eater, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, Red River Valley, Sweet Violets, She Was Only A Electrician's Daughter, Oh You Beautiful Doll, America The Beautiful, The Union Maid, Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean, Oh Canada, She Was Poor But She Was Honest, I'm A Little Pee Pot, Itsy-bitsy Spider, The International, Viva La Quinze Brigada, Over There, Lili Marlene, I Want To Hold Your [fill in the blank], With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, Ach Du Lieber Augustine, Sailing Down The River, Over The Waves, Little White Duck, She'll Be Comin' Around The Mountain and the rest. Mom would have liked it if we'd all sang the same song at the same time and if we had known all the words and didn't make them up as we went, but she felt it was better than fighting.

Which reminds me of the time LH dumped the contents of the "Little Potty" on Amos which caused Amos to...but ah, the memories, the memories.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 08:13 AM

Deer lard, Amos. Eddie Cantor is rolling over in his grave, and my reputation is being sullied by your lack of musical knowledge!

If you knew Susie, like I know Susie
Oh! Oh! Oh! What a girl
There's none so classy
As this fair lassie,
Oh! Oh! Holy Moses, what a chassis
We went riding, she didn't balk
Back from Yonkers
I'm the one that had to walk
If you knew Susie, Like I know Susie
Oh! Oh! What a girl!

If you knew Susie, like I know Susie
Oh! Oh! Oh! What a girl
She wears long tresses
And nice tight dresses
Oh! Oh! What a future she possesses
Out in public
How she can yawn
In a parlour, you would think the war was on
If you knew Susie, like I know Susie
Oh! Oh! What a girl.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 02:14 AM

Ron tells me he's had half the women in town, but I've still only met one who claims she's had Ron.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 01:49 AM

It wouldn't be a car, it would be a pickup truck. Evidently the overlay of the photos still works with the coordinates I gave you before. Last time I looked at my house in the map the truck was in the driveway.

I'm not a hadron and I have excited states also. I think we're talking parallel universe here.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 31 Dec 08 - 01:24 AM

Oh, BRAVO, Rapaire!! An original!!! Yayyyy!

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 11:28 PM

Gluon will do it.

If you knew Gluon
Like we know Gluon
Oh, oh, oh what a duckdog!
There's none so classy
Not even Lassie,
Oh, oh, what a duckdog!

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Donuel
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 10:57 PM

There will no experiments involving participle collisions because the Large Hardon Collider had a spill and no one is willing to clean it up until maybe sometime in August.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Donuel
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 10:52 PM

bugger off you bastards bugger off!


I think you've all been drinking !

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 10:34 PM

Your analysis of the process we term Shatnerization is brilliant, Amos. Simply brilliant!

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 10:20 PM

It's also inaccurate. If you'd like to see my house you have to look at 2240 South Fairway Drive, Pocatello, ID -- which puts it on the wrong side of the street and 41 numbers off. (If you do peek at it, take a look at the house to the right as well. It's in foreclosure again.)

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 09:13 PM

In another "random poke" I found a map with a picture of Stilly's house marked "No Car In Driveway" when there was plainly a car in the driveway. One of the many miracle mysteries of Mom's Murky Meanderings. GoogleMaps is a number of years out of date. Before the new driveway, before the landscaping, before the new fence and gate, the RAV4, before the Prius, this was my house but it was so much older then--it's younger than that now.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: MMario
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 08:41 PM



Well - we all KNOW that Gluon is not confined within the hadrons; so I suspect that yes, s/he could use a digital camara.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 07:01 PM

One of my favoriter sports at Mom's place is randomly hitting one of those hundreds of blue numbers up at the top. Random poke, and see whatchoo get.

Here's the latest dredge and trawl from the mystics depths of Mom's Past:

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos - PM
Date: 24 Nov 05 - 09:56 AM

Shatnerisation is a condition achieved by any set of a finite number of units whose transactions consist of BS. The complexity rules apply: when the number of BS transactions achieves a certain density a new order of BS emerges such that William Shatner seems to make sense.

This condition also -- but rarely -- occurs within the individual cognitive system, and when it does the individual so affected becomes delusory about positive qualities he perceives to be emanating from said Shatner. While this has no bearing on reality, it can accelerate Shatnerization in a group into which the affected individual injects transactions having an inordinate aberrative vector. This accelerates the normal process, and Shatnerization when catalyzed by such an element, tends toward the catastrophic.

A

Top that!


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 06:26 PM

Which is why I'm not a vegetarian.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:56 PM

You are what you eat, Rapaire.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:29 PM

(Please note how careful I am to spell "hadron" correctly. One little slip....)

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:28 PM

I have several excited states. Am I a hadron?

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:20 PM

ANy guru knows, it's all in the energy, Little Hawk.



A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:17 PM

How do you know when a hadron's been had?

How can you tell when a gluon has become unglued?

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:13 PM

Let's see...digital cameras respond tp photons...particles of no mass, but momentum. Hadrons have excited states known as resonances. Each ground-state hadron may have several excited states; hundreds of resonances have been observed in particle physics experiments. Resonances decay extremely quickly (within about 10−24 seconds) via the strong nuclear force. In other phases of matter the hadrons may disappear. For example, at very high temperature and high pressure, unless there are sufficiently many flavors of quarks, the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) predicts that quarks and gluons will interact weakly and will no longer be confined within hadrons. This property, which is known as asymptotic freedom, has been experimentally confirmed at the energy scales between a GeV and a TeV.[2]

Do you think, given this, that a digital camera would slow Gluon down below the threshold of interoperability with hadrons?


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 05:09 PM

Hamsters and hadrons...they both get no respect! "Simple" indeed! Humph!

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: MMario
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 04:12 PM

*sigh* Scientists make things so complicated.

Wouldn't it be much simpler if they could just stop trying to model these things and teach Gluon how to use a digital camara to get some good photos, instead? Since gluon would be in each of the quarks of the hadron s/he could get a complete panoramic multi-view.

And I have to wonder about the political correctness of referring to the hadron as simple. Certainly, there is no denying that most hadrons are not intellectually gifted, and that some may even be intellectually challenged; but "simple" just will not do as a descriptive term.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 04:02 PM

Yes, but is it as complex as keeping one's girlfriend or wife secure, relaxed, and happy at all times?

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 03:27 PM

Computing the Basics:

While protons, neutrons, and other light hadrons are considered basic particles, the mathematics describing their innards is incredibly complex. The simple picture of the inside of any hadron is three quarks that exchange gluons, the messenger particle of the strong nuclear force, among themselves. Reality is much more complicated, and our best description of the strong force—quantum chromodynamics (QCD)—requires incredibly powerful computers to have any hope of accurately modeling even a "simple" hadron. Using massively parallel computers and a technique known as lattice quantum chromodynamics, researchers in Europe have predicted the mass of a proton using only the theory behind the strong force. The fact that their computed mass is within a few percent of the experimental answer suggests that QCD properly describes the strong nuclear force. (Ars Technica)

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 03:10 PM

Hip? Dropping cellphones in the terlet? I guess Archie Bunker would call that hip.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 02:41 PM

"Dave [Kellett, the creator of 'Sheldon'] is a Southern-California native...[he] lives with his wonderfully talented wife Gloria in Los Angeles, creating Sheldon for hip folks like yourself."

--From the author's bio. Some slight emphasis supplied.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 02:19 PM

You have no idea of what you speak, sir; thou wotteth not the good folks of Calfornia, nor the beauties of the iPhone. Let me point out that when we ride folks out of state for bad practices (eating meat, wasting trees, high MPG, and the like) we send them to places like Pocatello. When you try to get into California you will pass through an Eligibility Checkpoint manned by our best telepathic SNAGs, in brown uniforms. Most cars they wave on through, but one of those three-strikes types finds himself in Secondary faster than you can say "Home, Lassie!".


And, as a rule, Californians only put in toilets those things designed for that purposes, such as turds and bum-wad. We tend toward digital dexterity and a reasonable relationship with our opposable thumbs, unlike the goofus in your Sheldon strip, who is clearly from the northern Midwest.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 01:56 PM

Yep, out here we call 'em "Californios." Like in "Them Californios are californicatin' Idaho right inta the ground."

'Tain't a compliment....

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 01:54 PM

MOM, you'll be happy to know I finally got into my old files, and I'm going to back them up before I do anything else. But I have such a tangle of layers and permissions and most of my programs aren't in the registry that I'm going to have to keep working on this for a while. Meanwhile, I have some soup on the stove and it should be ready in about an hour.

Little Hawk, you can come visit Texas if you want to see kind of what south is like (they act southern), even though here they call it west and it is geographically in the midwest. Doesn't matter how far south Amos is, he's just west. They don't even call themselves southwest, even though they have the best claim to the name.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Rapparee
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 01:35 PM

All you need to know about iPhones.

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Amos
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 12:29 PM

Well, just so there is no false advertising, I actually had to wear a sweater on the drive to work at 04:40 this morning. It has warmed up since then, though, so I have taken it off.

We do get rain once in a while which can be chilly in winter, and once I even had some frost on my windshield when I went otu int he morning.

The nearest we come to snow, though, is up in the Cuyamacas, a good forty miles east and up from here. Folks take their kids up there in winter to go sledding so they don't grow up culturally deprived.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
From: Little Hawk
Date: 30 Dec 08 - 12:05 PM

Well, it's worth thinking about...specially at this time of year.